Parliament discusses SA Post Office’s fate a month after ‘day zero’

A private-public partnership is simply the only way to save the SA Post Office (Sapo), Parliament heard on Wednesday.

According to its business rescue practitioners, Sapo faced day zero at the end of October if a R3,8 billion bailout was not received from the National Treasury.

Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana revealed in his medium-term budget policy statement on 30 October that there would be no more bailouts.

Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies Solly Malatsi has now said that though the SA Post Office has not been liquidated yet, its business model has to change.

Universal access to postal service

During a National Assembly Plenary on Wednesday, the ANC’s Khusela Sangoni first asked the minister how he will ensure all citizens have equal access to services while he intends to privatise Sapo.

She also asked what strides have been made to rescue and ensure the sustainability of Sapo since the announcement of day zero.

The DA minister responded that the SA Post Office has immense potential to serve South Africans, particularly those in rural or underserved communities.

“But to achieve this, the post office needs to adapt to a very changing environment that has become highly digitised and highly competitive,” Malatsi said.

For this reason, the department and National Treasury formed a task team to “look at partnerships that can help strengthen the competitiveness of the post office, to help make it sustainable, and to meet its service delivery obligations”.

He said the task team aimed to ensure Sapo would not be completely dependent on the fiscus, as that would be unsustainable.

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What about privatisation, details of partnerships?

Sangoni hit back, saying Malatsi missed an opportunity to clarify he had no intention to privatise the post office.

She added that the task team had been announced in October, but Parliament is yet to hear who the members of the team are, what its terms of reference are, and what the details of the partnerships and deliverables it promised.

Watch the plenary below:

To this, Malatsi said the terms of reference include “developing the scope for private sector participation in Sapo, agree and recommend the level of participation that must be considered by cabinet, identify and agree on non-core assets that must considered for disposal, ensure that there is compliance with the PFMA [Public Finance Management Act], supply chain management and other Treasury regulations, consider the responses from the market and recommend what those preferred options will be, and most importantly to identify the risks associated with the preferred options and developing mitigating measures to address them”.

He said the 22 members of the task team include officials from his own department, state-owned enterprises, and the National Treasury. The list would be provided to Parliament.

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SA Post office ‘fails to serve masses for years’

Fellow DA MP Tsholofelo Bodlani then told the minister he had walked into a department four months ago that had neglected to provide services to the masses for years. This led to the rot at the SA Post Office.

“Urgent and decisive steps are needed to save what is left of Sapo, to continue universal access to postal and other services,” she said.

She asked, as private-public partnerships are not new to South Africa, what has been the response of the market for calls for partnership?

Minister Malatsi responded that the task team is looking into this, but the reality is that for the post office to survive, it has to change what it has been doing.

“There are millions of poor South Africans, mostly social grant beneficiaries, whose hope in accessing the social grant is in the post office. So, we have to look at that option and pursue it.

“But the model that has brought it to where it is now clearly hasn’t worked.”

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